We don’t intend to mess with Texas or Texans, but we are comin’ to Plano, Texas to open our newest Collegewise office. And we’ve just officially hired Monica Del Toro Brown to run it.
Who is Monica?
Monica graduated from Stanford (fear the tree!) and has a master’s in education from Harvard. Since getting her admissions start as an assistant director at Wellesley College in 2006, Monica has spent the past four years as a senior admissions and financial aid officer at Harvard. She read 700-900 applications for admissions each year and was the director of the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative. It’s not every day we meet an admissions officer who’s also calculated hundreds of financial aid awards, and that experience on both sides of the process—admissions and financial aid—makes her the college counseling equivalent of a dual threat (I like to wedge sports analogies in to make up for my own athletic deficiencies.)
Why did we pick Monica?
Monica hasn’t just collected degrees and titles with good names (though she’s got an impressive list of them). In every opportunity she’s had, Monica found a way to make an impact. She’s managed staff workers and led reading teams. She’s asked for big opportunities when they became available and then cheerfully accepted the responsibilities that followed.
But that’s not really what did it for us.
We’re trying to do something special here. For us, it’s not just about helping kids get into college—it’s about fundamentally changing the way that families approach the process. For every new director of college counseling I’ve hired this year, there was something in their cover letter that I can point back to and say—“That’s when I had a sense she was one of us.” This was the section of Monica’s letter that really resonated with me:
"I read applications from wonderful, diamond-in-the-rough type students, who weren’t competitive in the Harvard pool, but who I just knew were going to be successful somewhere else. Harvard wasn’t the right fit for these students, but I could imagine they’d be great at some place like Bryn Mawr or Oberlin. I wondered if they were getting good college counseling at their high schools and I hoped they had applied to schools beyond the Ivys. I’m done with wondering and hoping about kids like this. I’m ready to step in and help students expand their minds and think about schools beyond the top schools on US News."
You won't have to "wonder and hope" about those kids here, Monica, and we can’t wait to have you join us in the good fight.
From Dallas to Seattle (and back)
Less than 24 hours after accepting the position with us, Monica had booked her tickets to join Meredith, Rhiannon and me in Seattle for training next week (I am unreasonably excited about the chance to spend a week with the three of them talking all things Collegewise and admissions). Then she’ll return to Texas to launch our Plano office and try to add matchmaking to the list of things Texans are known for (hopefully somewhere up there with great barbeque and everything being “bigger”).
So everyone, welcome Monica to Collegewise!